Social Anxiety and the Cued Activation of Relational Knowledge

A cued activation procedure was used to examine the hypothesis that social anxiety involves an expectation of being rejected or evaluated negatively by others, combined with a concern about impression management. Participants underwent a conditioning procedure in which distinctive computer tones were paired with thoughts of social rejection and acceptance, respectively. In a pilot study, a lexical decision task established that when these tone cues were played later, they differentially activated expectations of rejection. In the main study, female participants interacted with a male confederate while one of the tones, or a control tone, sounded repeatedly in the background. Several indicators of social anxiety showed an interaction between level of public self-consciousness and the nature of the tone played. High-self-conscious individuals tended to be affected by the cues, whereas low-self-conscious people were not affected.